On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Brendan Conoboy wrote:

Dan Christensen wrote:

quoted

I'm looking at either the Western Digital 500G RE2 drives or the cheaper
500G SE16 drives.  I have read that for use with a hardware raid card,
the RE2 drives are more appropriate, and I'm wondering if the same is
true for software raid.

It's a mechanical property- vibration tolerance and whatnot.  No difference 
between software and hardware raid in this sense.

quoted

I am planning to get two drives, and may use the entire drives as RAID1,
or I might partition the drives and use most of the partitions in a
RAID1 configuration, but leave a few of the partitions without RAID.

Suggestions appreciated (even suggestions for another drive I should
consider).

I do like the 5 year warranty on the RE2 drives and the increased MTBF,
as I do have a long history of drive failures...

I have 5 400GB RE2 drives in a RAID5 array (software raid, naturally). That 5 
year warranty has come in handy- only 1 of the original drives still remains. 
5 RMAs in under 3 years.  Maybe the 500GB is better.

That's a lot of RMA's, bad PSU or vibration issues, or a bad lot of 
drives?